Mike

You obviously don't know him or anything about him at all. Maybe you are projecting in your complete ignorance of him. He was a super researcher (still is) and the CHIEF WHISTLE BLOWER on the adultery with his famous 1986 paper. Did you read it? It is posted somewhere here. Ask a friend about it and him.

I do not play a victim. My complaint is about people TRYING (unsuccessfully) to traumatically victimize me, much in line with what the video at the head of this thread talks about, with mocking/jeering/banning rhetoric. My complaint is all the culty activity by the mockers is preventing us all from really discussing things, and wasting their time because I learned long ago how to resist it. I can take it, but this kind of activity damages those who engage in hateful mocking and misrepresentations. It damages credibility. It makes me all the more secure in knowing many perspectives here are dead. */*/*/*/* It was really the case that TWO threads about me, loaded with this devilish mocking etc, were BOTH posted on September 30, 2002. I did not start posting until Dec 25, 2002. The posters here were primed and ready for months to not engage in conversation with me, but to mock and misrepresent and discredit ONLY. That is all a lot of you have in mind; and you eschew civil, thoughtful conversation with all the zeal and stupidity that TWI did that at its low points. Now the roles are reversing, and the culty activity here can be eclipsing the one sidedness that once was a big part of TWI. As they get sharper and more focused on love these past 4 years, the opposite happens here, especially when and where I am posting. The closed mindedness is massive. */*/*/* I kinda snuck in here after those two threads about me ran their course. To their credit neither alfakat nor Research Geek mentioned my name. I had talked to Reasearch Geek on the phone a few times after a few e-mails. I knew of him by his real name. I had sent some e-mails to alfakat because he was in a group e-mail regarding football teams that another friend had sent me. The reason I was able to sneak in was because no one knew my name from those two pre-Mike threads about me. I had been reading only here since it's inception when I saw GSC announced on Waydale, where I also had never posting. I saw the mocking threads about me and prepared to register and post someday. When I did start posting I received a good natured, non-biased reception. I got along with everyone, and it was cool. Then alfakat eventually recognized me by my rhetoric as I SLOWLY put my cards on the table. The SUDDEN change in attitudes toward me were stunningly quick. All of a sudden I was the enemy and had to be defeated. Well all that failed. I just got stronger in resisting the baloney thrown at me. Here we are 20 years later. The bias here blinds most to be able to hear me. I know for sure many of the complaints here are accurate. But the solutions offered or implied SUCK! I am on the verge of some breakthroughs now with TWI-4, and I suggest you all re-think your opposition to me. I can bring your valid complaints to leadership FAR better than any of you folks can. I know them collectively at TWI as brothers and sisters, and I love them. I know you folks here after 20 years brothers and sisters, and I love you all too, and want to help you. I can better represent you folks at TWI-4 than your all are capable of doing yourselves, because I have been purging myself of all resentments toward TWI. I appreciate their many good points. I am moving ahead with solutions, and I want people here to contact me, either in the threads or in the Private Messaging system here, if they want to help. If you WANT solutions to the TWI problems, please contact me and we can brainstorm solutions. If you don't want solutions, please stop wasting your time trying to stop me. You have failed to deter me for 20 solid years, so just accept your inabilities, and move on with what you are good at. Try love.

Folks, I think we have beaten this horse to death. I have a backlog of responses on another thread, When Religion Becomes Traumatic. I'll meet you over there.

Not doctrines from the collaterals. Otherwise Schoenheit would have warned me about them. You're not processing what I said a few hours ago about my two full hour conversations with him. Look them up.

Nope. It is temporary suspension of some facts for some newer people. You forgot to mention those qualifiers. And it is FACTS not truth that is the context.

The extreme ugliness of what the suppression of the Schoenheit paper meant to me in 1987, when I first saw it and after hearing much of it's suppression shook my confidence in what I was taught in the collaterals and everything else AT FIRST. It was emotion. As I went back to the Word I knew, I started processing it better. The ugliness of TWI that I started gradually knowing in the late 70s, and the completion of that knowing in 1987, have not deterred me from promoting what was MOST BEAUTIFUL that came out of TWI, that is the collaterals.

I am at a point where I see the Way Tree as having lived its life and is now dead. It was supposed to be temporary 50 years ago. I am telling TWI people this slowly.

No. What I am saying is that the truth of the WORD will make them free, and that the UGLY FACTS of the ministry will heavily distract them from the truth. Can you see the difference? Now I can see how someone all tangled up in the ugly facts of the ministry could use, in addition to the truths of the Word, could use some some facts regarding the ugly facts of the ministry. But I think it would hurt them to get these facts too early, before they built the Word in their lives. What I am totally against, is showing a new person the ugly facts prematurely, and cause them to abort all further learning of the Word from the collaterals in conjunction with Bible versions. Please check out my two phone conversations with Schoenheit I posted a couple hours ago here on this thread. The collaterals, he implied, don't have any of that ugliness in them, and continuing a study of them will help them to do well.

No. What I am saying is that the people who were close to vpw, and who saw his sin, SHOULD have known better than him. I

Bravo, johniam! You might find some comfort with the TWI-4. 1994 was a long time ago. I do not look at myself as a meek follower of TWI-4, but more as a visiting consultant. I am offering them my help, and if they take it that would be great. Maybe after the big changes I'll decide to stay and help more. But I am dedicated to resist their residual baloney. I didn't see any in the locals, and that includes two long standing believers, both Reverends. HQ may still have some baloney to deal with, and I am prepared for that, but I am giving them the benefit of the doubt some. I like the much I see on the field locally, and I like the little I see at HQ so far. Their slowness to open up more, like the locals have, I am not so happy with. But I do know they are swamped with the work in Africa, so I wait a little bit longer.

I do not want pity at all. If I did, I am smart enough to know I could never find it here. What I want is civil conversation about difficult issues, without lots of emotion thrown in to scuttle the conversation. Now I have to admit, something. I don't know why, but somehow in the past two days there seems to be shift in strategies for dealing with me. The mocking and jeering diminished, and here we are discussing difficult things, and suddenly with far less of the childish type of hystrionics. Maybe the mocking men and the jeering jesters have figured it out that none of that thwarts me, and they were wasting their time. Plus, it did not make them look good to the read-only audience prancing about like a comic version of LCM in tights. I am thankful that we have actually been discussing things for the past two, maybe three days!

Sorry. I may have been unclear there. I meant new folks who just took the class, not new leadership. Both of those "new folks" have been in this discussion, and I think I did not emphasize which I was referring to. There is a need to shelter new students, new Bible readers, newly born again believers, babes in Christ. It should be a temporary sheltering, though. If you go back and read my post with this set of "new folks" in mind, then it should make a lot more sense.

Hold on there! I pump ZERO trash. I pump the collaterals mostly. I also pump the anti-trash paper by Schoenheit. TWICE, about 15 years ago, I had long conversations on the phone with Schoenheit about my focus on the collaterals as my only rule. Each call lasted an hour, and they were separated by about one year. I have posted this story at least twice here. In each conversation he tried his best to talk me out of it, but in the end he gave up. I was so amazed and thankful for what he said at the ends of both of those conversations. He said that if I discipline my life to the collaterals and ONLY the collaterals (and implying that would include applying them to Bible translations), that I would do very well in life. Of all the people in the world, I would count Schoenheit to be at the top (or near it) of the heap of people who know the collaterals inside and out. If there was any trash in the collaterals that could mess me up, he would have known about it, and he would have warned me about it messing me up in our long conversations. But he knew they were sans trash. He said I would do well with a collateral based life BECAUSE there is NO TRASH in them.

I think there is a lot of truth in that. The Word says everyone has sin in their life. For those who were so close to VPW that they could see the sin in his life, imitating that sin is an indication of them not having a proper understanding of the Word. Lots of leaders fell this way, and some that I knew very personally, and it was very sad for me when I saw them descend from being great servants to God's people this way.

I have indicated to them that it was the secrecy that ruined things, when the secrets got out. I agree with you that MOST of the secrecy is extremely inefficient in that it fails to be secret eventually. But sheltering new students from the garbage of yesteryear has its merits, so this is a matter of getting the right balance of openness and transparency versus sheltering (secrecy) new people from what would distract and discourage them from their study of the Word. The tricky part for TWI leaders is to know when and how much THEY should tell the new people, as opposed to allowing them to find it out on GreaseSpot, or some other way that eliminates all the positives in an unbalance.

I am mostly thinking of TWI history from 1982 to 2022. I’ve had only the tiniest talks of this with local ministry officials, like just me mentioning something in passing with zero detail. But with a couple of smart unofficial leaders who live very far from me, I have had very detailed conversations for about a year. They want to do it with me. They know their perspective on things will be lost in history if they don’t make an effort to get a full and unvarnished history out and available.

That is nice to hear. In my plans, and in my activity so far, including some GreaseSpot people in a history writing committee is important. This place is pretty thorough in the gathering of the negative aspectgs of the history, but overly so. Lots of exaggerations and even lies enter the mix unfiltered. TWI is just the opposite. Some of them are pretty expert and thorough in gathering the positive aspects of the history, but hiding or whitewashing the negatives.

That could be the case. Thanks for the new information.

Yes, thanks. THAT part I was aware of. My wording may have been not the best.

Right. I had heard all the wives should be equally treated and supported.

Holy Mackerel ! I need to read all that carefully. Thanks, Bolshevik !!! My Catholic upbringing was extremely saturated with Mary worship and her never having sex, even after Jesus' conception and birth. Anything, even the most remotely related to sex, was saturated in sin consciousness and guilt. It was so unpleasant that I had a difficult time working the Word on this topic after I took the class. I focused on other items I thought were much more important. But NOW, I can plainly see that the new TWI-4 will need to do difficult but important work on dealing with the Schoenheit paper, and that means it's important that I work on the Schoenheit paper as well, and to be better aware of what is in the Bible on this topic. These new wives of David are totally new to me. I only ran across the concubines thing a month or so ago. Does anyone know if these things (from the article link above) were ever taught in the Corps?

No that is not my intention. Please don't think evil of me.

Thanks for the reminder. I have read about this but forgot it. This should be included in the mix of a thorough study. Might the book "Song of Solomon" be an exception to this? Or a new paradigm? Again, I ask from a position of relative ignorance of this book of the Bible.

Trying to get past the nomenclature and modern culture on this topic: I just want to see more thoroughly what is in the Bible on these items I have bold fonted above. If anyone has verses and insight on these things, I want to learn.